Yellowknife Online – Creating a Sustainable Information Portal

When it comes up that an entity is copying the concept, maybe not completely, but the general idea, it hurts. I guess I should be flattered?

I get it. That’s business.

Not going to lie, I’ll spend a couple hours in self-pity mode. Chalking up this hurtle to my lack of business savviness, or lack of connecting with partners, or general openness. I’ll get over it when I remind myself that I’ve organically grown a solid platform without any funding from a government or NGO and that I don’t just host and publish this content for because a client asked me to. I do it because I love it.

But WTF.

Yellowknife has a small consumer base, even when we factor tourists. The constant creation of different iterations of the same thing only hurts everyone. Consumers get confused. Where do they look?

Partnerships go both ways. I know I need to reach out more frequently to the Yellowknife Community, be it individuals or NGOs, to work with and partner on content and technologies to make the information better, fuller and more accessible.

I know I need to do that, but this should also serve as a reminder to all those individuals and NGOs out there that they too can approach me with ideas.

But hey, maybe I’m the idiot. Maybe creating something entirely from scratch, dumping all sorts of money into building it and the money into advertising it is the way to go.

What Yellowknife Online lacks is a revenue model. In that sense, it isn’t even a business.

It is not a non-profit – I do give away free content about Yellowknife, about other businesses and get nothing in return other than the appreciation from the reader, but I’m not seen as a non-profit because I personally own and manage Yellowknife Online. At the same time, it is not a for-profit business either. It has no business model or not one that would give it neutrality within the community.

I don’t want Yellowknife Online to make a profit. I want it to support itself – hosting, content creation, community involvement.

What have I done recently to create revenue to cover costs:

I briefly mentioned how much it cost to operator Yellowknife Online here. Because I’m not good at selling advertising despite having 20,000+ monthly unique visitors – call me if you’re a sale person interested in some work 😉 – I became a licensed tour operator.

Let’s be crystal clear here. I would rather not be a tourism operator. I would rather connect prospective visitors with exciting tourism operators. I would rather run around the world or the internet telling people about Yellowknife, showing them what they can do here while visiting or living here. And talking about actual information, not just the fluffy stuff. I would rather field a million questions about Yellowknife and direct those people to the right places.

I operate tours to cover the costs of Yellowknife Online strictly so I can keep creating content about Yellowknife.

What is the downside to being a tourism operator when you want to maintain a neutral position within the tourism community in Yellowknife? You are immediately seen as competition by other operators

Well shit.

It’s hard to prove that my intentions are good, despite how many times I rewrite and publish the above, it is just the way it.